The Lhasa Atlas. . - Forgotten City Celebrated - book review

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2002 by Peter Davey

By Knud Larsen and Amund Sinding-Larsen.

London: Serindia Publications. 2001. [pounds sterling]40.

Lhasa is the most mysterious and mythic city in the world. High up on the plateau, it was until a few decades ago approachable only by pack animals. It was cut off from the south by the Himalayas, the world's highest mountains, and from China by grey deserts. The awesome Potala Palace towered isolated over the plain, echoed by the Jokhang Temple, dominating the small town. Then, it had about 30 000 inhabitants. Today there are 10 times that number. The city has vastly altered. Now there are international hotels and discos. New buildings are made of concrete, not brick and stone. The plain of meadows and gardens between the Potala and the Jokhang is covered with rigid ranks of precast dullness.

The Chinese have rightly been accused of debasing Tibetan culture. Much of the old city round the Jokhang has been destroyed to make way for new functions, and an infamous motor road has been driven through its organic tissue. But the Chinese, coarse as their changes have been, are perhaps no worse than many of their '60s predecessors in the ancient towns of Europe and Asia, who casually wiped out history in the cause of ill-defined progress. In Lhasa, the destruction seems much more tragic because, in the West, we have now (on the whole, and with very many scandalous exceptions), learned to respect what we have inherited.

Now, there is some hope that what remains of the old city of Lhasa may have hope of continuity. Two Scandinavians, Dane Knud Larsen, and Norwegian Armund Sindig-Larsen have made a magnificent book -- The Lhasa Atlas: Traditional Architecture and Townscape, It is well written in a language foreign to the authors about a place almost utterly divorced from the rest of civilization. They record the state of the city now, decry the vile destructions and offer hope. They use the most up-to-date satellite technology to describe the townscape, and old fashioned cameras, tapes and measures to record individual buildings. The book is a synopsis of immense labour: they have chronicled and recorded a place that at first seemed to be crashing in front of them.

Their efforts (though they are too modest to say so) are clearly having some effect. Destruction has been dreadful, but a tattered fabric remains. The Potala has been made a World Heritage site. The book teaches us what must be preserved and why. The Chinese Government is concerned to allow indigenous cultures to flower. They should send copies of the book to all their commissioners in Tibet.

You should buy it because you could perhaps help to save Lhasa, and because the book is a beautifully and carefully crafted account of a fragile civilization hovering at the very edge of cultural catastrophe.